Control of the olive fruit fly using genetics-enhanced sterile insect technique

BMC Biology

Research Article

John Vontas¹  Aris Economopoulos¹  Martha Koukidou²  Hong-Fei Gong²  Thomas Ant³  Luke Alphey³  Polychronis Rempoulakis⁴ 

[1] Faculty of Biotechnology and Applied Biology, Department of Biology, University of Crete, Heraklion, Crete, Greece;Oxitec Limited, 71 Milton Park, OX14 4RX, Oxford, UK;Oxitec Limited, 71 Milton Park, OX14 4RX, Oxford, UK;Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, OX1 3PS, Oxford, UK;Oxitec Limited, 71 Milton Park, OX14 4RX, Oxford, UK;Faculty of Biotechnology and Applied Biology, Department of Biology, University of Crete, Heraklion, Crete, Greece;

关键词: olive fly;    Bactrocera oleae;    sterile insect technique;    SIT;    release of insects carrying a dominant lethal;    RIDL;    autocidal control;    insect transgenics;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1741-7007-10-51

 received in 2012-03-09, accepted in 2012-06-19,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe olive fruit fly, Bactrocera oleae, is the major arthropod pest of commercial olive production, causing extensive damage to olive crops worldwide. Current control techniques rely on spraying of chemical insecticides. The sterile insect technique (SIT) presents an alternative, environmentally friendly and species-specific method of population control. Although SIT has been very successful against other tephritid pests, previous SIT trials on olive fly have produced disappointing results. Key problems included altered diurnal mating rhythms of the laboratory-reared insects, resulting in asynchronous mating activity between the wild and released sterile populations, and low competitiveness of the radiation-sterilised mass-reared flies. Consequently, the production of competitive, male-only release cohorts is considered an essential prerequisite for successful olive fly SIT.ResultsWe developed a set of conditional female-lethal strains of olive fly (named Release of Insects carrying a Dominant Lethal; RIDL®), providing highly penetrant female-specific lethality, dominant fluorescent marking, and genetic sterility. We found that males of the lead strain, OX3097D-Bol, 1) are strongly sexually competitive with wild olive flies, 2) display synchronous mating activity with wild females, and 3) induce appropriate refractoriness to wild female re-mating. Furthermore, we showed, through a large proof-of-principle experiment, that weekly releases of OX3097D-Bol males into stable populations of caged wild-type olive fly could cause rapid population collapse and eventual eradication.ConclusionsThe observed mating characteristics strongly suggest that an approach based on the release of OX3097D-Bol males will overcome the key difficulties encountered in previous olive fly SIT attempts. Although field confirmation is required, the proof-of-principle suppression and elimination of caged wild-type olive fly populations through OX3097D-Bol male releases provides evidence for the female-specific RIDL approach as a viable method of olive fly control. We conclude that the promising characteristics of OX3097D-Bol may finally enable effective SIT-based control of the olive fly.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Ant et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.